Texas Rangers Summarized Season In One Game: Part 1

The Texas Rangers did something that most teams don’t do for their fans, they decided to display a summary of how their season has been and why you should love them all within 9 innings.

I sat down to watch Cole Hamels take the mound for the Texas Rangers while writing a piece on him possibly winning a Cy Young award this year. I was feeling great about this decision while he was looking great at the beginning of the game. He had the Mariners scoreless through 3 innings while the Rangers provided a 4 run lead going into the 4th, that’s when things got dicey.

After a couple of singles to start the 4th inning, Hamels walked 2 batters in a row the first loaded the bases and the second led to the Mariner’s first run. The defense helped out for a couple of outs before Cole Hamels ended up walking another batter.

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That led to the Mariner’s second run walking across home plate. I believe at one point I saw a pitch count by inning that had single digits 1st,2nd, and 3rd inning and then 43 pitches for Hamels in the 4th.

He got into some trouble in the 5th inning and ended up having thrown 88 pitches in 4.1 innings allowing 7 hits and 6 earned runs. That’s when Alex Claudio (the hidden hero of the game) came in and shut things down for 2.2 innings until handing the ball to Matt Bush who closed out the last 2 innings of the game.

The Texas Rangers waited until the 7th inning to finally tie things up at 6 a piece and then gave the lead right back to the Mariners in the 8th. In that 7th inning Rougned Odor had a single that he attempted to stretch into a double but failed. But he did manage to moved Adrian Beltre from 1st to third in that at bat. It was visible that Adrian was not pleased with the aggressive attempt by Odor and let him know about that by giving him a harder than usual love tap to the head after Beltre had scored in that inning, I’m setting things up here if you can’t tell yet.

The emotions that this performance evoked are too much to explain in one article. The number one struggle for the Texas Rangers this year has been quality starting pitching and for this performance to come from Cole Hamels was a shock but the team that Never Ever Quits wasn’t going to start this day.

That is why this Texas Rangers team creates a feeling as though you can relate to everyone on the roster. Follow the rest of this observation piece here and leave comment about which Texas Ranger you feel you relate to the most and why.